Chapter 4 — The Woman He Chose

LYDIA’S POV

I stopped cooking for two in the third month.

Not a decision I had planned, I just came home one evening, stood in front of the refrigerator, and realized I had no interest in feeding a man who was feeding something else entirely behind my back. So I closed the refrigerator, ordered food for one, and ate it in the bedroom with the door shut.

David didn't say anything about it, he wasn’t bothered.

That told me everything.

The house had changed in ways I couldn't understand. Nina arriving earlier than her schedule. David coming home for lunch on days he never used to. The way a room felt when I walked into it —Like two people had just stopped being close.

I felt it every day.

I said nothing in those days.

I don't know what I was waiting for, proof maybe. I needed something substantial I could hol against them, but they kept making it worse.

It was a Tuesday when I came home and found them on the couch.

David's arm around her shoulder, Nina tucked against his side the way you tuck against someone, like it was normal. The television was on, they were watching something, they looked comfortable in a way that took time to build.

They didn't hear me come in.

I stood in the doorway of the living room for a very long time and I looked at my husband with his arm around my maid and I felt empty. David turned and saw me.

His arm moved off her shoulder so fast it was almost funny.

"Lydia." He sat up straight. "You're home early."

"It's seven thirty," I said.

Nina stood, smoothed her dress, looked at me with those warm eyes that had never once been warm for me and said, "Good evening Mrs. Cole," like she was an employee who had simply been keeping the homeowner company.

I looked at her.

"Good evening Nina," I said.

I picked my bag back up from where I had set it down and walked to the bedroom and closed the door behind me.

I sat on the edge of the bed. Placed my jaw on my hands and stared at the floor.

I was not going to cry. I had cried enough in this house for things I hadn't even confirmed yet. I was not going to cry over an arm around a shoulder. I told myself, it meant nothing.

My stomach turned.

That Friday I left work at five for the first time in months. I went to the place that David always said he wanted to try and I made a reservation for two. I came home, changed into something he had once told me he loved on me, and I stood in the bedroom doorway and told him I wanted to take him to dinner.

He looked at me from where he was sitting on the bed.

He gave me a weird stare, like saying, what’s the need?

"Okay," he said. "Give me twenty minutes."

We went.

It was the best two hours we had shared in longer than I could accurately remember. He put his phone away without being asked. He asked about my cases and actually listened when I answered. He laughed at something I said and for a moment.

I reached across the table and put my hand over his.

He looked down at it. Then up at me.

"I miss you," I said.

He turned his hand over and held mine.

"I know," he said.

I went to sleep that night, smiling like a new bride, I had hope of our marriage.

It didn't survive the weekend.

Saturday morning I was in the kitchen when I heard David on the phone in the hallway. His voice was low again. I had learned the difference by then between his work voice and that voice.

I stood at the kitchen counter with my coffee going cold in my hand and I listened to the murmur of it without being able to make out the words and I felt the fragile thing in my chest crack quietly down the middle.

He came into the kitchen after, poured himself coffee, leaned against the counter.

"That was a client," he said, without me asking.

I looked at him over my cup.

"Okay," I said.

He looked back at me, we were two people standing in a kitchen performing a marriage that had already ended and both knowing it and neither saying so.

Sunday Nina came in even though it wasn't her scheduled day.

I watched from the top of the stairs as David opened the front door. I watched the way his whole body shifted when he saw her, the way you open a door for someone you can’t do without.

I went back to the bedroom.

I sat on the floor beside the bed , I put my hand on my stomach.

I was twelve weeks.

I had a doctor's appointment on Thursday that I was going to again, alone, the way I had gone to every single one.

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{PRESENT DAY}

I walked into Patricia's office on Monday and I asked for the week off.

She looked at me over her reading glasses for a long moment.

"Is everything alright?"

"No," I said, because I was too tired to perform. "But it will be."

She gave me the week.

I spent Monday and Tuesday in the apartment while David was at work and Nina wasn't scheduled and the house was just mine. I walked through every room slowly, the kitchen where she cooked his meals. The living room where his arm had found her shoulder like it was home. The hallway where he made phone calls he called work.

I was memorizing it. I understood that later. I was saying goodbye to it room by room without knowing that's what I was doing.

Wednesday I made dinner .The kind I used to make in the first years of our marriage. I set the table, sat across from him, waited until he had eaten enough that the food couldn't be used as a reason to look away from me.

"David," I said. "I need you to end it."

He put his fork down, his eyes widened.

"Whatever is happening between you and Nina." I kept my voice calm. My hands flat on the table. "I need you to end it. I am your wife. I am still your wife. And I am asking you, I am begging you—" my voice broke on that word and I let it break because I was beyond pride at this point. "Please choose me."

The dining room was very quiet.

David looked at the table. His jaw moved, his hands were very still beside his plate.

"Lydia—"

"Look at me." My eyes were burning. "Please just look at me when I'm asking you this."

He looked up.

And in his eyes I found my answer before his mouth opened. He had already chosen.

He just hadn't said it out loud yet.

"I can't," he said. "I'm sorry. I can't."

Something finished inside me.

Quietly and finally,  like a door that had been swinging for months that finally shut.

I nodded once. Picked up my napkin from my lap and folded it neatly on the table beside my plate.

I stood up.

"Okay," I said.

I walked to the bedroom, opened the drawer of my nightstand. Took out the card the lawyer’s number.

I sat on the edge of the bed and I looked at that card for a long time.

Then I picked up my phone.

And I made the call.